Paperback Row

Image

By Joumana Khatib

June 2, 2017

Six new paperbacks to check out this week.

The Gene:An Intimate History,by Siddhartha Mukherjee. (Scribner, $20.) A sweeping history of the study of genetics is paired with an account of mental illness in the author’s family. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Emperor of All Maladies,” Mukherjee explored the ramifications of a corrupted genetic code, cancer; this work elegantly grapples with the moral consequences of learning to program heredity ourselves and control our own fate.

This Must Be the Place,by Maggie O’Farrell. (Vintage, $16.95.) In the back roads of County Donegal, Ireland, an American linguist finds a forlorn child with a stutter, and his mother — once a famous actress who vanished at the height of her career. The encounter sets off a love story spanning addictions, accidents and grief, all told in a novel “with a vivid sense of play,” Elizabeth Graver said in these pages.

The Boys in the Bunkhouse:Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland,by Dan Barry. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) In rural Iowa, dozens of mentally impaired men, after being released from institutions, were exploited for labor, humiliated and abused for decades. Barry, a journalist for The New York Times, chronicles the scandal through its conclusion, reached thanks to the help of a local reporter and other heroes.

Our Young Man,by Edmund White. (Bloomsbury, $18.) After success in Paris, Guy, a dazzling French male model, moves to the United States, where he cycles through wealthy benefactors and lovers, grapples with the AIDS crisis and maintains his career — all while resisting any signs of age. The novel “becomes an oddly poignant contemplation of what it’s like to live ‘way past’ your shelf life and make choices that don’t quite match your insouciant appearance,” our reviewer, Michael Upchurch, wrote.

The Art of Rivalry:Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art,by Sebastian Smee. (Random House, $20.) A study of four notable pairs — Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas; Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso; Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning; and Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon — focuses on the “yielding, intimacy and openness to influence” that drove their friendships and creative tensions.

Nutshell,by Ian McEwan. (Anchor, $16.) The opening line of McEwan’s brilliantly inventive novel — “So here I am, upside down in a woman” — sets up its premise: A pregnant woman and her lover plot the murder of her estranged husband — all overheard by the unborn child she is carrying. Privy to their scheme but seemingly helpless to intervene, the fetus contemplates questions of bloodlines and love.